Vegan lunch, Vietnam-style

On my hunt for vegan dishes in Elephant and Castle I went to look at one of the many restaurant options.

I started out at Artworks, a home to many new businesses, very close to the railway station.

Elephant and Castle, mid-February 2016. With pedestrian tunnels closed off and cycle lanes added by this summer, the area is under change.

Just a stone throw away from the roundabout and railway station there is Artworks Elephant with its more than thirty entrepreneurs brought together in a compact collective.

The Artworks is made out of shipping containers stacked on top of each other much like The Boxpark in Shoreditch.

The three floor high collective contains independent businesses from restaurants and cafes to an art gallery space and a tattoo studio.

One of the restaurants is Love Fresh Vietnamese in Unit seven, by a pizzeria and a juice bar which both serve vegan options.

The only vegan dish on the menu is Ma’s tofu, but it’s delicious and an easy meal to take away. The ingredients are fresh and healthy, the packaging biodegradable and easy to recycle.

The staff are friendly. We chat about home-cooking and Vietnamese coffee. They say they’re working on a dairy free version. It needs perfecting, but I promised to come back for it some time later. Luckily vegan eating in the area seems to be a growing trend.